For many years Lu Hsun was hailed as the cultural standard bearer of the Chinese revolution, coming to the fore in the bourgeois revolutionary period of China and... more

Old Tales Retold

COMMENTARY

Facetious fantasy

I could have picked either of the two other major story collections published during Lu Hsun's life—Call to Arms or Wandering—to spotlight here. They're all great. But I've already discussed in another commentary the most important piece in those two volumes, The True Story of Ah Q.

Lu Hsun's final collection, Old Tales Retold, gives us something
very different, if not new, to consider. As indicated by the title, this is a volume
of old Chinese fables that have been rewritten from a new perspective—namely the perspective of a twentieth-century revolutionary who considers
the ancient morality tales to be outdated and destructive for a modern
audience.

In the Preface (Lu Hsun's prefaces are always highlights of his books),
the author says it took him him thirteen years to recast these eight
stories to his satisfaction. He admits he did not always follow the
old storylines and often gave free rein to his imagination. "And having
less respect for the ancients than for my contemporaries," he says,
"I have not always been able to avoid facetiousness."

Unfortunately the facetiousness—or satire, to use a nicer word—is difficult to pick up if one does not know the original stories
that are being revamped. Still some of the tales are a hoot. For instance,
my favourite "Forging the Swords" begins with a realistic enough scene
of a boy confronting one of the rats that keeps him awake at night,
but moves on through increasingly fabulous events as the boy is sent
by his mother to avenge his father's death by assassinating the king
with a specially forged sword, to climax in a bizarre fight of three
bodiless heads in a boiling cauldron. I'm not sure of the political
import of the tale but it sure does make a mockery of fairy tales that
glorify monarchies.

"The Flight to the Moon" is apparently a take-off on ancient legends
of an heroic archer and his wife who drank an immortality potion and
flew to the moon to become a goddess there. In Lu Hsun's version Yi
is failing to find prey to satisfy his wife's appetite, engages in battle
with a former student (with a trick conclusion) and tries to shoot the
moon down after his wife disappears.

"Resurrecting the Dead" is written in the form of a drama. It makes
great fun of the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu who is famous for having
once dreamed he was a butterfly but, upon waking, no longer knew if
he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man or a man who had dreamed he
was a butterfly. He also wrote about the equivalence of life and death,
right and wrong, and other opposites, the realization of which supposedly
leads a thinker to disdain all judgment. In Lu Hsun's story, Chuang
Tzu summons unearthly powers to bring back to life a man who has been
dead five centuries and who promptly calls a policeman to charge Chuang
Tzu with robbing him.

These and the other stories in Old Tales Retold take some
getting used to, especially for their uneasy mix of social realism and
fantasy. But if you take the time to familiarize yourself with Lu Hsun's
world (you can start with Internet research), you may find them
fresh, clever and quite
entertaining.